Thanks to a minor power outage in Vancouver (it took out a big chunk of the city apparently), I lost my awesome uptime on my linux boxes.
On the plus side, the reboot means I have a newer kernel and I’ve fixed some minor issues I was having with my soundcard on my workstation.
There’s been some recent discussion about whether Linux will adopt GPL version 3, the proposed changes to the current GPL, version 2, by Stallman and the Free Software Foundation. Seems Linus isn’t on board with adopting GPLv3 for Linux. Interestingly, the controversy all stems around DRM - digital rights management. Linus makes some excellent points. I’m a little bit surprised, but I’m finding myself defending DRM to a certain degree. Or at least the right to have DRM.
The GPL, as it was conceived, was about openness. The Linux kernel is “open,” and people can modify it and do just about anything else so long as they provide the modified source code to anyone who wants it. As I say, it’s about openness and contributing back to the community.
Linus believes that open-source is truly a better model for software development. While I will reserve my judgement on that, it truly is a matter of personal (but so often corporate) preference. People should not be forced to develop open-source products. We cannot hinder commercial development though. And there is really no difference between that and DRM.
In the case of Linux, much of the issue stems around hardware vendors restricting kernels which run on their DRM-enabled hardware, which, as Linus insists, is a hardware issue, not one to be fixed via anti-DRM software licensing. If a hardware vendor wants to do this, then why should we stop them? It should be consumers who ultimately judge the decisions of commercial vendors. Not licensing.
In the spirit of openness and choice from the whole free software movement, it seems somewhat absurd to restrict these sorts of things via licensing. That’s not to say that I’m pro-DRM by any means. I just don’t feel it’s appropriate to force, via licensing, this kind of idealogy upon the world.
I finally got around to upgrading my primary desktop workstation now that I’m back in Vancouver to Ubuntu (switching from SuSE 9.1).
I’m now the proud user of a native AMD K7 kernel. Woot.
brett@brie:~$ uname -a
Linux brie 2.6.10-5-k7 #1 Thu Aug 18 23:14:40 UTC 2005 i686 GNU/Linux
KDE 3.4.2 is great. Everything is working quite well. Apart from a few minor issues with some of the extra repositories, all is great. I still have a few remaining issues to sort out with mplayer, but since I don’t use it that much, I haven’t been that bothered to actually fix them yet.
Some days when you read the tech news, all you hear about is .Net. It makes you wonder whether the future of everything is in .Net. And it’s not just from Microsoft; it comes from all directions, including Novell’s recently purchased Ximian Inc., project owners of Mono, the open-source GNU .Net release.
It makes me uncomfortable knowing Microsoft has full control over this technology. They control the licenses under which open-source projects like Mono can exist. If they pull-back, would that kill Mono and .Net on every other platform apart from those which Microsoft supports (i.e., Windows)? Novell/Ximian doesn’t seem to worried.
Personally, I have a Java bias. I like Java most because it’s multi-platform. This is huge. I’m a big multi-platform user. My primary workstation is Linux, but I still have some Windows boxes kicking around. And let’s face it, anyone that hasn’t locked them selves in a GNU/GPL cage has to use Windows sometimes. And Java applications can be run on any of these systems with ease. I love the language, it’s strictness and syntax. It’s really quite beautiful. But the virtual machine is somewhat slow. And Swing is not the nicest of GUI’s out there. When I’m working on Linux, I want something native, preferably something that uses the KDE/Qt framework to integrate nicely with my KDE desktop. And on Windows, I want a native Win32 UI.
Java just doesn’t cut it for large GUI applications. How many large-scale Java applications can you think of that are widely adopted? Apart from development tools like Eclipse, the biggest I can think of for the end-user is OpenOffice.org. And this is an excellent example of a large, slow Java app. It crawls compared to native Office suites like Microsoft Office or KOffice. Don’t get me wrong, though — I use OO.org all the time and I’m very thankful for having such a full-featured open-source multi-platform office suite. But it’s still slow. And it doesn’t “fit in” with the rest of my native, platform-specific software.
In comes .Net and C# — Microsoft’s answer to the Java threat. This language is very similar to Java. A little less strict, maybe not quite as reflective, but it’s close enough that a Java programmer wouldn’t have to spend much time learning new syntax to successfully write C#.
Say goodbye to annoying old-school Windows development using MFC and the like. Say hello to object-oriented development for all your Windows needs, including GUI with Windows.Forms. It’s about time.
Not only is there C#, but Visual C++ .Net, Visual Basic .Net, J#, and third-party things like Delphi for .Net, and even FORTRAN for .Net. I guess it only makes sense that there would be a surge of development environments and languages that compile into CLI. Today I’m evaluating #Develop, an open-source IDE for C#/VB.Net for Windows. It’s very light-weight but not quite as nicely refined (not surprisingly) as Visual Studio .Net 2003.
Despite my Java preference, I have to say that for once I’m almost impressed by Microsoft’s work. At least, what they’ve done with the framework. Mono is starting to look more promising, and I’m even considering tinkering with it at home on Linux (despite having to deal with GTK rather than Qt). Apparently Windows.Forms for Mono is in the works. This is good news. Essentially the same piece of code will run natively on both Windows and any other Mono-supported platform. This is excellent. It’s like native Java, if that were possible.
So is the future of development in .Net? It sure is starting to look like it. .Net is invading everything and every platform. The only places that Java still seems to hold firm ground (and perhaps any serious ground at all) is in J2ME (mobile clients, such as PDAs and cell phones) and J2EE (server-side web services and the like). But even J2EE is threatened by .Net’s Web Services.
I guess I had better get my feet wet with .Net. Luckily I’m working on a (Windows) C# project at work. I’m using both #Develop and Visual Studio .Net 2003 on my workstation. We shall see how this goes.
Okay, so I’ve had the most bizarre problems with name resolution on Linux since I moved to SUSE. Okay, well, it’s not actually in terms of resolution. It’s odd. Previous problems aside that I’ve already blogged about, this one is new and recently discovered.
It seems that name lookup is fine and quick. Everything is fine in Mozilla, Konquerer, and just about every other application, including ncftp. But if I try and use telnet to connect to some random ftp server by hostname (ie., telnet ftp.suse.com 21), it takes about 20-30 seconds to establish the connection. Same goes for any service that I try to connect to via the command line using telnet. Or the native ftp client (and as I note, ncftp is also fine).
My network set-up has all DNS going through my NAT box which provides DNS forwarding. This works quite nicely and I haven’t had problems with it in the past. I do note, however, that I’m quite certain that the DNS forwarder included in my cruddy NAT software does not support IPv6 calls, which SUSE tries to spit out, despite it being disabled. This *may* be part of the current problem.
To test it, I booted with Knoppix. Boom. Same problem. This isn’t unique to SUSE. Is it something weird with my NIC? Nope. I booted with Knoppix on my laptop, and the same issue occured.
So I upgraded my NAT software and fiddled a little, and now everything is fine.
The moral of the story? Don’t use old NAT software. No, wait — I’ve got a better one: don’t do NAT on Windows. I’m still doing it on Windows because I need that box to run Windows for various legacy hardware I run off it. But I seem to have fixed the problem.
Okay. That’s my ramble. No more.
